The giant Belgian I'm strapped to, Vladi Pesa, goes over the plan one more time--we will jump out of the plane together (actually, I'll lift my legs, and he'll do the jumping) and hurtle toward earth at 120 miles per hour. After thirty seconds or so, our parachute will open and then we will look directly up to see Jari Kuosma flying in our direction. The flyby is made possible by Kuosma's wingsuit: a white jumper with red webbing between the legs and triangular wings connecting the arms and the torso. "If I hit you on the way down," Kuosma cheerfully adds by way of ending the briefing, "you die."

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At 13,000 feet the door opens, and the earth rushes past us, a blur in the square doorframe. I manage to make it to the edge and put myself in position: head up, arms back, thumbs behind my harness. Pesa tightens the straps that bind us together, grabs my legs with his. The fact that Kuosma has been stuck outside the country and hasn't used his wingsuit for the past three months worries me for an instant. But it's a bit late to voice any concerns. Pesa is counting down in my ear.

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How, exactly, did I find myself in such a situation?

In the early autumn of 2002, a friend of mine took me for a drive to Gardiner, New York, where a drop zone known as The Ranch was holding a "pond swooping" contest. This was the first time I'd seen any skydiving of any kind, and this particular variation of the sport--unlike others that take place thousands of feet above the ground--was well suited for viewing. After their invisible free fall, these sportsman would open their tiny, high-performance parachutes, glide down to fifty or so yards from the ground, and do a kind of hard turn that would flip them and their canopies facedown, parallel to the earth. The parachute, in other words, would stop slowing them. But before they hit the ground they would straighten out again, hurtle horizontally over the earth--with their legs bent so their feet wouldn't touch the ground, though their knees might brush the taller weeds--toward a pond in the center of which a spongy square raft floated serenely. Skimming across the pond, and dipping an occasional toe into its murky water, they would do their best to land on the buoyant target to earn ten points.

I was entranced by the sight of human bodies falling and fluttering out of the heavens. But I was also attracted to this subculture made up of people highly skilled at a potentially lethal activity, which, though stunning, no one had heard of outside the sport. But swooping, it turned out, was not the most obscure of skydiving's potentially lethal subsets. Talking to some of the veteran divers, I learned that there was a "birdman" who jumped with a set of wings of his own devising who was supposed to have been at the competition. He didn't show, though, thanks to visa troubles that kept him out of the country.

I decided to track down this birdman, Jari Kuosma, and subsequently discovered that he was not alone in his pursuit. Not only were skydivers in the thousands beginning to use the wings he was selling, but there was a long history of men trying--and failing--to do what had only become possible in the last few years. A little research revealed that from Icarus to airplanes, human history was filled with a certain kind of inventor and dreamer who, with homemade wings, had tried to fly from whatever precipice he could find--risking, and often losing, his life in the attempt. Peasants, kings, and scholars had leapt from rooftops, towers, and cliffs wearing an endless variety of frames and feathers and breaking a similar variety of bones. And the plane, to this type of daredevil, was just another precipice from which to try his more organic form of flight: as soon as parachutes and propellers appeared, a bat-wing phenomenon swept--and swooped--the country, with proto-skydivers doing their best to glide through the air on wings of stretched canvas for crowds often in the tens of thousands. They were, however, little better than their predecessors at keeping their bones whole. But now modern technology had finally caught up with the imagination. And Kuosma, it turned out, had competitors. Not only were there several wingsuits on the market, but hi-tech rigid wings were being built that could send people shooting across the sky as fast as 180 miles per hour. After some three thousand years of failure, we were living in a veritable renaissance of personal flight.

One particular statistic intrigued me: seventy-two of the seventy-five batmen who jumped from planes for air shows from the 1930s to the 1960s were killed in their wings. Months earlier I hadn't even heard of such "birdmen," and now there were seventy-five of them, most of whom had died some kind of presumably spectacular death. Who were they? Why did they keep at it? Why didn't the rest of the world know about them? [Note: After an article I wrote about Kuosma came out months later, it quickly became apparent that the statistic was not quite accurate. Several birdmen (most of them calling themselves batmen now as well as in their winged heyday) contacted me, usually claiming to be one of the first to use a bat-wing. Adding them to the bat-wing jumpers I already knew had survived proved the estimate way off the mark. Further research revealed that the numbers came from a quote by Red Grant, himself a bat-wing survivor, who was merely taking a wild guess at how many of his compatriots had died trying to fly.]

Though the subject appeared somewhat comic at first--a seemingly endless litany of the injuries and deaths of daredevils unwilling to learn from the endless injuries and deaths of those before them--the fact was that their efforts had somehow led to flocks of skydivers now flying about the clouds, more or less safely, and others now pushing the limits of what could be done with a set of wings.

Theirs was the true history of flight, it seemed to me--one that the airplane had usurped. Both before and after the appearance of mechanized flight, men have yearned and struggled to fly like birds. As one skydiver told me, if piloting a plane is flying, then rowing a canoe is swimming. The airplane is merely a product of this initial drive, a minor offshoot in the long tale of human flight.

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The Wright brothers succeeded thanks to engines with ever-greater power-to-weight ratios that were able to overcome the limitations of the human body that had stymied so many of the birdmen before them (and, of course, their patient, scientific approach had something to do with it). We may think of them as the legends who made the first airplane, but in their minds their inventions were meant to achieve the dream of human flight, the realization of the ancient myth of Icarus and Daedalus. They were part of a rush of inventors competing to be the first to fly, to succeed with new materials and understanding at what was to them the end of a long, absurd, and repetitive history of attempts to flit birdlike about the air. The Wright brothers' success, though, did not allow us to flit. Instead, now that their wings have evolved from glider to biplane to jumbo jet, we sit crammed into a pressurized cabin with two carry-ons and no leg room. Today, airplanes dominate the sky and the story of man in the air. But the development of the airplane is only one part of man's grand quest to fly. While many dedicated their lives to perfecting the machinery that we soar in today, others persisted in the dream of a more personal flying experience.

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Kuosma's wings mark the culmination of that dream and the beginning of a new era of flight. Of course, the invention of a wingsuit that would allow anyone to play among the clouds with palatable odds of survival came in bits and pieces during the twentieth century. But Kuosma is the first to mass-produce such suits. And as president and founder of BirdMan, Inc., he's had more mileage in wings and has developed more skill with them than any known human. If you buy a wingsuit from him, he'll be glad to give you personal instruction. "It's as if a basketball fan could take a few lessons from Michael Jordan," one skyflyer told me.

I located the man some months after the pond-swooping contest I had witnessed, and he suggested the possibility of flying by me while I made a tandem jump of my own. Whuffo that I was (that's skydivese for a virgin of the air), I waffled, but after watching a videotape of Kuosma steering around the edge of a cloud, I couldn't resist the idea of seeing it with my own eyes. Unfortunately, Kuosma, whose business was in DeLand, was still stuck in Finland, and it would be months before we could try any such demonstration. That meant months for my imagination, fueled by parachute disaster stories I'd been reading, to establish a rather strong and ever-building thrum of fear. It also meant months of stagnation on the ground for Kuosma (you're only as good as your last jump, they say), and he had to take up ski-jumping to satisfy his adrenaline addiction. Finally, in January of 2003, I met Kuosma in DeLand, just days after he had arrived there himself.

Kuosma looks like the European expat extreme sportsman that he is. Put a surfboard under his arm instead of a wing, and he'd fit right in on some Southern California beach. His two-toned sandy blond hair has a Tintin flip in the front that points straight toward the heavens. Around his neck he wears an Incan figurine on a black band, and on his right shoulder there's a tattoo of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man--but instead of a second pair of arms, it has a set of wings. "When the perfect man creates, he can fly," he told me, explaining the drawing in what he refers to as his "Finglish."

Mom and Pop Kuosma were a bit less daring than their child. His mother was a secretary and his father ran a shop that sold old U.S. army surplus. He was also an amateur pilot, and as a child Kuosma remembers being in awe of the skydivers he saw at the airport with his father. As a teenager, Kuosma took up martial arts and started jumping off roofs with his pals. His mother's friends thought the boy might "need some help," but their advice went unheeded.

When his father died in 1990, Kuosma was all set to take over the family business, but a few lawyers managed to make off with the inventory. "They ended up stealing everything we had: all those nice army clothes, boots, and everything. But I don't think I would be here right now if that didn't happen. So thank you to those lawyers." With nothing to do, he headed to the old airport and took up sky-diving. In the lives of the birdmen, the loss of a parent turns out to be one of the few common threads.

Soon he was something of a big bird in a little birdbath. In 1994 he was one of fifty-seven people who broke the Finnish record for the largest free-falling formation. Later he took a trip to Estonia, where he learned a Russian technique for jumping at frighteningly low altitudes. Kuosma was the first to try the stunt in Finland--he jumped out of a plane flying at 250 mph, a mere 300 feet above the ground. At that speed the wind should open a parachute instantaneously. "In my case it did," says Kuosma, "And I was pretty glad."

Kuosma was flying the smallest parachute in Finland at the time--135 square feet, compared with the usual 300 or so. The size went some way to placating his need for speed (currently he uses a canopy of 75 square feet) by allowing him to perform what is now a standard maneuver called a hook-turn--the same trick the pond-swoopers used to zip across the earth at 60 miles per hour. A slight miscalculation can cause a jumper to snap his legs against the ground instead of skimming over it (skydivers call it "femuring"), and the whole business made the Finnish skydiving association skittish. They passed rules banning certain kinds of landings just to get Kuosma to quit his hijinks. (In fact, hook-turns are the primary cause of death and injury in skydiving.)

By then, Kuosma had earned a bachelor's in business and administration, had followed that up with a degree in international business, and had taken a job at Sonera, Finland's largest telecommunications company. "I thought, okay, now the good job at the big corporation, and the career, and that will be my thing to do. So I went for that and I got the very nice job at the big corporation. I had a suit on and all that good stuff. It took me two weeks to realize that it was not for me."

Within a few months, Kuosma had quit his job and drawn up a business plan to manufacture and distribute a new parachute that was well made and super-fast, but still unknown to the skydiving community. But the plan would end up being used to produce something else entirely.

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Not long after Kuosma left his job, he and his friend Robert Pecnik traveled to a 3,700-foot cliff in Arco, Italy, that they planned to jump from. At an Internet café there, they came across a photo of a skydiver named Patrick de Gayardon in a wingsuit. Gayardon was the world's most famous skydiver, and he had built the first truly successful "ram-air" wings. Unlike the single-layered wings that had failed his predecessors, Gayardon's wings were made of cells that filled with air--like modern square parachutes--and gave his wing enough shape and rigidity to truly fly. At the sight of Gayardon streaking across the sky, the two friends instantly knew what they had to do--build a set of wings like that for themselves.

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Pecnik already had some experience making jumpsuits for skydivers, and Kuosma had already devised a business plan to manufacture speedy parachutes. "We thought, 'Hey, it's easy,' " says Kuosma. "We have wings and we can make suits, so why not put them together?" By the end of the year Pecnik had made three wingsuits. They headed to DeLand to try them out.

Gayardon had invented the wingsuit and wowed the skydiving world with spectacular stunts, but after 500 flights he went the way of the batmen of the thirties and forties--a malfunction sent him to his death in a Hawaiian banana field just months after Pecnik and Kuosma had seen his photo. Undeterred, the pair based their wingsuits on what they had seen of Gayardon's getup, but neither Pecnik nor Kuosma was an engineer of any kind, and when they went to test their wings for the first time, they gave themselves a 50-percent chance of surviving. "It was just such a big jump into the unknown," says Kuosma. "We were doing something that we knew some people had done before . . . but they were all dead."

Kuosma and his partner did not die. In fact, everything went as planned, except for one thing. "I could never have expected it to be so mind-blowing, so beautiful, so absolutely addicting. I came down and I was absolutely high."

Armed with a business plan and a little money, they set up shop in Slovenia, where Pecnik had his jumpsuit business, and made the first eighty wingsuits. In June of 1999 they packed the suits into a car and headed to Austria. They were down to their last Finnish mark and had to smuggle the wingsuits across the border to avoid paying customs. From there they set out to visit every drop zone they could find. Many of the airfields wouldn't allow Kuosma even to demonstrate his suit; the head of England's largest drop zone told them they would have to leave if they so much as said the word "wingsuit." Where he could, Kuosma gave a seminar, flew his suit, and then offered to pay for the flight of anyone daring enough to try it. Volunteers returned to earth slack-jawed, and word began to spread.

The experience, they said, was wholly different from an ordinary skydive. The wings of the BirdMan suit fill with air as soon a skyflyer spreads his limbs (not something he should do right away, or he risks hitting the tail of the plane), and within seconds the noise of the wind dies off and the body begins moving forward. The suit is made of ripstop nylon, a fabric with "zero porosity," so the wings remain rigid in flight. The shape of the wing is made by the arms and shoulders of the person in the suit, and it takes a few flights to find the ideal position. Cutaway cables enable the flyer's arms to be freed in an instant, which reduces the danger of being caught in the kind of inescapable flat spin that killed many of the bat-wing jumpers.

Anyone who's logged 200 skydiving jumps and has at least $799 to spare can buy a BirdMan suit and slow the downward speed of his free fall from 120 mph to 45 mph and cruise horizontally through the clouds. This almost doubles his time in the air before opening his parachute. By 2003, more than 2,000 people--including many women, a first in the history of birdmen--had experienced wingsuit flight. Four had died. (A small number, perhaps, but not exactly comforting when you're sitting in the hull of a rising twin-prop.)

Watching Kuosma fly is breathtaking. At first he drops straight down like any free-faller. But in a matter of seconds the wings catch the air and the fall curves forward in a graceful cycloid. If there's a plump cumulus in sight, Kuosma banks toward it and glissades around its edge, or plunges right through. He can fly on his back, make figure-eights, or soar along a highway--outrunning the cars below. "There are no speeding tickets up there," says Kuosma. And that's more than just a clever way of putting it, coming from a man who's been jailed for exceeding the speed limit while driving through Georgia.

Three of the four deaths attributed to the BirdMan suit occurred on jumps from stationary heights like cliffs or bridges. It's hard to know to what degree the wingsuit can be implicated. The chief thrill in base jumping--an acronym for jumps from buildings, antennas, spans (i.e., bridges), and earth--after all, is the threat of death. "Officially, we don't even recommend base jumping," says Kuosma. "We can't really recommend Russian roulette to anybody. Although it's fun." The other death occurred when an inexperienced skydiver tried to jump with a friend's wingsuit. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was sent into a spiral and hit the ground wrapped in his parachute.

The deaths give Kuosma pause--but a short one. "Accidents do happen a lot," he acknowledges. "It's always really hard, but you just start getting used to it. It's something you accept as the price for what you are doing."

"That yawning door, opening into space, is like the very jaws of hell," wrote the French birdman of the 1950s, Leo Valentin, of his thoughts in the plane before a jump. "We're not birds, look at us, we're only men! So quick--let's get back to earth. To earth--at once!"

My thoughts exactly. Then the Belgian launches us into space. We flip out the back of the plane and suddenly the fear is gone. I am out there. A pinprick of consciousness punching through the atmosphere. The sun watches from the edge of a 360-degree horizon. The wind blasts against my eardrums and they pop and pop and pop. I eat clouds. Scream with pure joy. The planet spreads out below me, indifferent . . . and then a simple foomp.

The world changes from sensory overload to total peace, absolute silence. We're hovering, seemingly motionless. The Belgian taps me on the shoulder and points up to the left. I look up in time to see Kuosma pop out of a bank of puffy clouds, his canopy already open. He spirals around us, grinning. It's like meeting a long-lost friend in a dream. Before long, the drop zone rises to our feet and we've landed.

"I'm in love again," says Kuosma. His eyes are wide and his face is flushed. He's overjoyed, despite the fact that he had to abandon our little plan. "I was like a kid again. My heart was pounding in the plane." He had followed us till we went through the cloud. Rather than risk a collision, Kuosma changed course and found us after he'd opened his canopy. But it hardly matters. I'm just glad I'm no longer a whuffo. [Note: Months later we tried the flyby again. Once under an open parachute, I looked up over my right shoulder and saw a speck emerge out of pure blue. The speck soon grew to human size and Kuosma whipped through the air in front of me, just feet away, throwing me a grin and a thumbs-up sign.]

Soon the beer appears. War stories and life philosophies start spilling out as the sun goes down. "You feel smaller up there," says Kuosma, "but much bigger. Because you know how small you feel and the knowledge makes you feel bigger." A Yorkshireman named Steve Ashman is at the table with us. He, too, has had his first wingsuit flight in months, and he's positively glowing. "I went through my first cloud today," he says with a grand, goofy grin. Steve learned to skydive just to fly the wingsuit. And once he'd flown, he tells us, he never looked at a bird or the sky the same way again. He pauses before quoting Leonardo. "Once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you long to return."